SEATTLE — A federal judge in Seattle has ordered immigration officials to release a Somali teenager who was taken from his Oregon foster family and placed in an adult detention center in Tacoma.
U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman said in her order, released Tuesday, that the Office of Refugee Resettlement violated the law by saying the boy was no longer a minor based solely on a dental bone scan analysis.
The boy fled Somalia after his father was murdered and requested asylum. The resettlement agency moved him to a foster home in Portland, where he attended high school.
But after the bone scan, officials said he was not a minor and they put him in detention.
Matt Adams, legal director for the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, said the agency’s actions were indefensible.
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